The time is rapidly approaching for onboarding to the Federal Housing Administration’s (FHA) Electronic Appraisal Delivery (EAD) portal before its June 27, 2016, mandatory use date. Several hundred mortgagees are in the process of onboarding to the EAD portal during the November and December onboarding phases alone, while hundreds more are registered for the upcoming phases.
The third onboarding phase closed to new participants Dec. 15, 2015, with just four onboarding phases left. The FHA encourages all mortgagees to register now for one of the remaining available onboarding phases, even if plans change and you need to reschedule to a different phase. For more information visit FHA’s EAD Portal Mortgagee Onboarding Process web page.
Some may wish to wait to register for onboarding until the in-house technology development budget and schedule is finalized for 2016. Building a direct link to the EAD portal does take significant time, but if you’re planning to submit appraisals to FHA using the portal’s direct Uniform Resource Locator (URL), your investment of time for onboarding is much shorter, FHA said in a news release.
As for organizations interested in onboarding but not ready to transition the entire operational workflow to EAD portal use, until the mandatory use date, mortgagees can submit appraisal reports to the FHA using both the EAD portal and existing submission processes. However, all appraisals submitted via the EAD portal become the appraisal record, and subsequent updates to these appraisals must be submitted through the EAD portal.